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Within this blog, the experts of crealytics – Europe's fastest growing PPC technology company – provide commercial decision makers with important PPC tools as to monitoring and performance as well as support them in taking the right decisions for their department. Regarding PPC managers, this blog provides useful insights which can be gainfully used in the daily PPC business.

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Why we prepare for Valentine’s Day and you should too

The day of love and romance is not just for those planning on giving a gift to that special someone. It’s also a big day for ecommerce in general. As Valentine’s Day’s reach grows, there’s a lot of money waiting to be earned. In America last year, 28% of all Valentine’s Day gifts were purchased online. If you’re in the retail business, you don’t want to miss out as people continue to spend more on Valentine’s Day every year!

While consumer spending on Halloween surpassed Valentine’s Day in 2016, it still holds a strong fourth position for highest spending day of the year. To be a bit more precise, people in the United States spent an average of $147 each on Valentine’s Day, with men’s spending being almost double that of women’s.

When it comes to search behavior, interest begins to really pick up at the start of February. We also see that sales peak on February 7th and 11th. So you want to make sure you have everything set up by then at the latest.

Unsurprisingly, the categories most affected by Valentine’s day are gifts, flowers, chocolate and jewelry. We gathered trends regarding traffic spikes, search volumes and conversion probability by analyzing our internal data pool from 2016, as well as Google’s keyword planner. If you’re advertising in one of these areas you should definitely check whether you’ve got everything covered.

We also analyzed the US, UK and German markets for differences in search behavior. Our goal was to help you figure out the unique cultural differences you need to take into account when dealing with different countries.

Here are our recommendations for making the most out of the Valentine’s Day uplift:

The US has the biggest uplift

Not only is the United States the biggest market for Valentine’s Day by a distinct margin, they are also seeing the steepest percentage increase in traffic with nearly 1000% more searches for “Valentine’s Day” in February and still 136% more in January.

What you should do: Our suggestion for the US concerns the gift category. Make sure your list of keywords with “gift” in it is extensive. You should also duplicate all your gift keywords using the word “present” instead of “gift”. While “present” isn’t seeing uplifts quite as strong as “gift”, it will still cover a lot of search volume.

The United Kingdom loves flowers

Searches about “flowers” in the UK show the biggest uplift percentage-wise in all categories in all countries. While searches for flowers also increase in Germany and the US, they can’t compete with the UK’s love of buds.

What you should do: The big uplift won’t go unnoticed, of course. Therefore expand your keyword coverage and keep your eyes on KPIs like search impression share so as not to lose out to your competition.

Germany plans ahead

Of the three markets we analyzed, Germany is the smallest, but it shows the biggest differences in overall search behavior. There’s a massive increase in Valentine’s Day search queries – over 900% – in February. In terms of categories, we noticed more interest in jewelry, gifts and even chocolate in January. Turns out Germans prefer to plan ahead for Valentine’s, especially when getting more expensive gifts.

What you should do: Get your keywords together early. While it’s important to skim the market in February, don’t miss out on potentially much more valuable traffic in January,

Top Category Keywords

Now after giving a few recommendations for improving your campaign performance, here’s a look at our personal Top 5 keywords for each of the trending categories. Feel free to use these in your accounts!

Gift

Engagement gifts

Get that gift

Romantic gifts for her

Romantic gifts for men

Love gifts

Chocolate

Personalised chocolate

Chocolate bouquet

Chocolate roses

Valentine’s chocolate gifts

Valentine’s day chocolate

Jewelry

Wedding rings

Engagement rings

Diamond rings

Men’s engagement rings

Vintage engagement rings

Flowers

Flower delivery

Valentines flowers

Red rose

Rose delivery

Flowers by post

We hope our insights provide you with what you need to close any gaps in your Valentine’s Day preparation and will earn you some lovely figures.